Pink Floyd (page 2)

Dark Side Of The Moon (The Album)

“If there’s any central message it’s this: this is not a rehearsal. As far as we know – and I know there are some Hindus that would disagree with this – you only get one shot, and you’ve got to make choices based on whatever moral, philosophical or political position you may adopt. As I say in the very first lyric, “Breathe, breathe in the air, don’t be afraid to care.” You make choices during your life, and those choices are influenced by political considerations and by money and by the dark side of all our natures. You get the chance to make the world a lighter or a darker place in some small way. We all get the opportunity to transcend our tendencies to be self-involved and mean and greedy. We all make a small mark on the great painting of life. If ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ is anything, it’s an exhortation to join the flow of the river of natural history in a way that’s positive, and to embrace the positive and reject the negative, given that one might be able to identify with the things which seem to be a matter of great confusion to a lot of people. [Quoting from ‘Breathe Reprise’ – Ed] “Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees, to hear the softly spoken magic spells.” People are confused as much by religion as politics. We have to be so aware of this now with the coming of the next crusade. In 2003, you know, 600 years later, we’re looking at a new crusade.”Roger Waters (744)

“It’s more a general catch-all [the phrase ‘Dark Side of the Moon” – Ed]. It’s also to suggest that there’s a camaraderie involved in the idea of people who are prepared to walk the dark places alone. You’re not alone! A number of us are prepared to open ourselves up to all those possibilities. So when I say, “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon”, what I mean, I suppose, is, “If you feel that you’re the only one… that you seem crazy cos you think everything is crazy – you’re not alone. It’s all Star Wars – the light side and the dark side in us all. That’s the good thing about Lucas’ work, that these ideas get to be expressed – which was a big part of science-fiction writing in the Sixties and Seventies.”Roger Waters (744)

“The moon and the lunacy are obviously hard to get away from. It was referring to the dark side of the pressures of life that can drive a poor boy to madness.”David Gilmour (744)

“The piece is related to the pressures that form on us and other people generally. That is the very rough theme – although it doesn’t really relate to us as much as we’d originally planned. The various pressures that we talked about when we wrote it were physical violence, travelling, money, religion. Those were the things which we thought sidetracked people from things we thought might be important. And religion for us is one of those things. I mean, not religion as much as Christianity as practised by a large section of the population of Britain.”Nick Mason (742)

“‘Dark Side’ started as a sequence called Eclipse. Most of it was developed in rehearsals for live shows, and we played it live at the Rainbow in London and opened shows with it in America in 1972. The concept grew out of group discussions about the pressures of real life, like travel or money, but then Roger broadened it into a meditation on the causes of insanity.”Nick Mason (743)

“‘Dark Side of the Moon’ was an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy that was desperate to get out. There are a number of things that impinge upon an individual that color his view of existence. There are pressures that are capable of pushing you in one direction or another and these are some of them. Whether they push towards insanity, death, empathy, greed, whatever, there’s something about the Newtonian view of that physics that might be interesting and could be what this record’s about.”Roger Waters (1035)

Time

“That’s not really the point of the song [preaching about frittering away time – Ed]. It’s actually about understanding your own autonomy. I wouldn’t want to preach to anybody. I used to go and stand at the south bank at Arsenal every week. It was great; I loved it. Some people would say, “What a waste of time.” So it’s not about that. I suddenly realized at 29 that I had been fulfilling someone else’s prophecy. I was programmed by my childhood and education into believing that I was preparing for a life that was going to start later. It was never explained to me as a child that I was actually, moment by moment, in it.”Roger Waters (744)

“People often think, “If only… I could write the hit song, or have the success, everything would be OK.” It’s very nice, but it doesn’t solve any of the problems you might feel about yourself. The feelings that you have fundamentally spring from the nature of the relationship you had with loved ones when you were babies and children, and you transcend that through an inward journey and not through connections to the world of commerce or entertainment.”Roger Waters (744)

Breathe

“Actually… it does mean that [don’t forget to stop and smell the roses – Ed]. It’s very easy to wake up in the morning and get on with whatever you have to do. I used to go on the underground from Goldhawk Road on the Metropolitan line towards Paddington, and some artist had written on the concrete beside that line, “Same thing day after day, get up, get on the tube, come home, watch TV, go to bed.” It repeated all along the side of the tube line until you were going so fast you couldn’t read it any more and then you went into the tunnel. It was a great piece of art. So I think it’s important to encourage people to be aware of what’s going on. I feel we’re increasingly in danger of finding ourselves in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. We’re controlled with diet and television, and it would be very easy for this to be the millennium of the living dead. You see McDonalds in the Champs Elysee. What the fuck’s going on with the French? The last bastion of culinary standards, and they trudge into McDonalds and buy this shit. Why? I don’t understand it. People need to be encouraged not to be pawns in the game.”Roger Waters (744)

Eclipse

“It isn’t very positive, but it’s very true. “And everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon” – saying that there’s the potential to express the positive side of everything, but that all the stuff that we have talked about on the rest of the record has the potential to get in the way, and it’s up to us to make a change. We all get to choose to some extent. We get the chance to think through questions of how useful it is to invade Iraq or not. We all get that opportunity – invade Iraq or protest in some way. We all get to choose our lives so long as we’re not being bombed.”Roger Waters (744)

The Great Gig In The Sky

“I didn’t, when I wrote it, think, “This is all about death,” cos I don’t think I would have written that chord structure. I get so excited when I hear Clare singing. For me, it’s not necessarily death. I hear terror and fear and huge emotion, in the middle bit especially, and the way the voice blends with the band. The way it was mixed helps.”Rick Wright (744)

Us and Them

“It’s about those fundamental issues of whether or not the human race is capable of being humane.”Roger Waters (1035)

Brain Damage

“It’s obviously a bit to do with Syd, and I think it’s about defending the notion of being different.”Roger Waters (1035)